This Little Piggy Had Roast Beef, a new roast beef place from the folks behind the popular Artichoke’s pizza operation, opened recently at 1st Avenue and 9th Street, which sharp-eyed readers will recognize as being remarkably convenient to the Awl offices. As a service to those of you who like roast beef, and because we were both really hungry, we grabbed a couple of sandwiches for lunch today. Our tasting notes follow.

Choire: Thanks for bringing me that 14 inch long pile of meat and bread!
Choire: Now I can’t work.
BALK: My fingers are much more mottled than usual as well.
BALK: But HOW WAS YOUR BEEF?
Choire: I would describe it as “delicious”? It was covered in JUS and a decent, if slightly stringy, mozzarella.
BALK: I went for the cheese whiz, just so we might offer the broadest possible amount of coverage to our audience. I found it to be excellent. Juicy, the bread softening as you ate it but not to be point that it completely collapsed, the meat not fatty, etc.
Choire: I admire their support of the traditional Cheez Whiz Cheese Product, though of course I will never bring myself to put it inside me.
BALK: That sounds similar to something she said, etc. It was just fine! I mean, it’s not a cheese steak, since it is roast beef, but the whiz worked fine for what it was. Now, I know your particular food issues, in that you won’t just eat any old crap even out of necessity, so lemme ask you: Does this pass the Choire Sicha purity test?
Choire: There’s no way to say this without sounding like a B-rate gay version of Julie Klausner, but basically, I tried not to think about the provenance of the meat when I put it in my mouth.
Choire: I don’t care where that meat came from!
Choire: It was tasty!
Choire: It is probably hooves and whatnots?
Choire: But I finished that thing off.
Choire: (God. I know)
BALK: I saw it resting in the tray when I went to pick it up, it looked like an actual roast beef.
BALK: But.
BALK: We need to discuss the salt issue.
Choire: Jesus Christ.
BALK: I am a GIGANTIC proponent of salt.
BALK: I salt my bacon, and then I salt the salt on the bacon.
BALK: One of my biggest sexual fantasies is to perform cunnilingus on Lot’s wife.
BALK: I am a man who LIKES HIS SALT. And I’ve got to say?
BALK: That roast beef was SALTY. Like, if I’m ever going to have that heart attack I’ve been working up to, it’s gonna be today.
Choire: Yes. I actually don’t… I don’t feel right?
BALK: Are you getting the tingling thing down the arm?
Choire: No! Though I did have that the other night? I mean, I feel bad, not in the way, like, OMG BAD MEAT? But like, “Oh I have a cup of salt inside me that I cannot dilute even with this 33.8 ounce container of seltzer!”
Choire: The sneaky thing is: we didn’t realize this WHILE we were eating!
Choire: Which is what makes the sandwich magical.
BALK: I know, it just tasted great!
BALK: And then… jdkvngekjrgvbsvbjjvk.
BALK: So I guess we should tell the roast beef fans of New York that they will enjoy this sandwich, but they should call their cardiologist in advance?
Choire: Jesus. Also, why was mine, on the hero, so goddamned immense, while yours, on the roll, rather petite???
BALK: I think they took a look at me and decided I didn’t need it?
BALK: No, actually I guess the “this way” (whiz) comes on a roll while the fancy-pants “that way” (fresh mozz) comes on a hero.
BALK: (They also offer pastrami, but God knows how many mounds of sodium that contains.)
Choire: Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on salt poisoning, so I’ll never know if I’m potentially a victim. But I think we do agree: WE ENDORSE THIS SANDWICH. (Do not take internally more often than once a week.)
BALK: I agree.
BALK: And.
BALK: [Dies]

Director David Lynch has put together a promo for singer Ariana Delawari’s Lion of Panjshir album, and, well, it is EXACTLY what you would expect from a David Lynch promo. Even Lynch’s synopsis is Lynch-like!

ARIANA WRITES GREAT SONGS — THEY ARE FILLED WITH FEELINGS AND THOUGHTS FROM HER LIFE — HER LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD AND LIFE IN AFGHANISTAN WHERE HER ROOTS ARE — ANCIENT AND MODERN FLOW TOGETHER HERE — THIS MIXTURE OF CULTURES AND HER MELODIES AND LYRICS CONJURE A GREAT UNIQUE FEELING IN PEOPLE — PEOPLE ARE SURPRISED AND EMOTIONALLY MOVED BY THIS MUSIC — ARIANA’S GOT SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT AND SHE DOES IT REAL WELL — IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DEBUT ALBUM SHE’S MADE.

I’m just happy to see The Black Lodge return!

Among the wreckage of this morning’s Oscars, we find Where the Wild Things Are: not only eaten up and spit out by the hype machine earlier this year but also a lesson in “No You Can’t” for the dreamy sad youngs. Oh, Hollywood, where dreams go to die, etc., whatevs.

Those bags of greens you buy to be stoned? They may be covered in doody!

Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas is working on a new book about modern conservatives, and in the name of research commissioned a “massive poll, by non-partisan independent pollster Research 2000 of over 2,000 self-identified Republicans.” He calls the results “nothing short of startling.” You may agree! Unless, like 53 percent of the respondents, you believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama. [Via]

by Julie Klausner

Once upon a time, our pal Julie Klausner went on a date with a man she’ll call “Rob.” This relationship is among quite a few quite vividly covered in her new nonfiction book, I Don’t Care About Your Band, which is out today. Just now! This is where you can buy it on Amazon. Go ahead, we’ll wait. You should know that this book’s subtitle is “What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I’ve Dated.” Highly descriptive, and also accurate! Anyway, back to Rob. We were quite taken with this excerpt because she manages to both memoir and meta-memoir simultaneously-a neat trick. Let’s all hold hands and read together.

We went to a glorified diner called Bendix, and it wasn’t a date, because I had a boyfriend. Rob wasn’t initially attractive to me, but because he was so gooey and determined, I grew fond of him quickly. I think there’s something beyond the grass being greener that fuels one’s attraction to men who exist outside of a relationship you’re in. It permits you to twist the reality of meeting what’s merely a self-centered guy who wants what he can’t have into a self-congratulatory progress tale. You think to yourself, “Well, I’m different now-I’m girlfriend material-so, of course he wants to be with me. If only I weren’t in this dumb relationship with a guy who’s already proven he wants to be my boyfriend, I’d be in the throes of what is an oyster-like world of pearl-paved streets. Dumb Guy Who Loves Me! Doesn’t he realize how explosively the universe has changed since I’ve been cooped up being loved within the confines of reality?

After Bendix, and its ensuing meatloaf, Rob walked me home and kissed me. And as soon as he did, I felt every last cell in my body rush with guilt. I am too inherently neurotic to ever cheat on somebody without treating myself to a concurrent crucifixion, so the day after I was kissed, I broke it off with the guy I was dating so I could legitimately fall for Rob….

My on-the-marketness was like an unsolicited homework assignment for the guy who, twenty-four hours earlier, was falling over himself to charm me with compliments lavished over too-expensive loaves of meat. I saw his behavior flip a bitch. Clearly, Rob was freaked out that I’d actually gone through with the steps I had to take in order to date him with a clear conscience, and now he felt responsible for my being available.

After that, we would get together for what I suppose are technically dates to a twenty-two-year-old, which is how old I was at the time, but since he was thirty-one, I can’t really call what we were doing “dating.” We were hanging out and hooking up….

We would always sleep at my apartment. He was superprotective of his space, and also, as it turned out, paranoid about being seen with me around his friends, because, he explained, he was concerned they would “gossip.” That’s a double-threat of sorry-ass. It was quickly becoming clear, even to a self-congratulatory progress tale in her early twenties, that there was no fucking way in the world Rob wanted to be my boyfriend. He’d invite me to see one of his shows, then he’d have me meet him a block away once he got offstage, so nobody would see us leaving the theater together and speculate that we were an item….

I’d never had the experience of being anyone’s secret lover-the girl who hides in the garbage can or shows up wearing a false mustache. “Dating” Rob was the closest I’d come to being with a guy who cared more about what his friends thought than the girl he was screwing felt. I didn’t get that at all. Why didn’t he just fuck his friends?

I chewed him out over that “wait for me around the corner” bullroar, because even with the self-esteem of a twenty-two-year-old, I was never a doormat. It had been a couple of months already-what was he hiding? I didn’t know that this is just how some guys are, and that you should avoid them, like people with tattoos on their faces or relatives who want to borrow money. I just couldn’t reconcile the way Rob was with the way he changed after I no longer had a boyfriend.

Then 9/11 happened.

Hey, don’t you love memoirs? What other genre can footnote an unprecedented historical atrocity as a plot point in a fuck-buddy story?

“He made me wait for him around the corner, the asshole! Then planes hit buildings and people died just because they came to work that day, and it smelled like burning tires below Fourteenth Street for a month and people who believed in God all of a sudden had to defend their certainty after bearing witness to something so uniquely sensless and chaotic and cruel. I mean, yeesh! I can’t decide who’s a bigger jerk-Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or that prick I was dating!”

Anyway, I remember being uncertain whether to call Rob that day. Like everybody else who lived in the city, I was getting concerned emails and phone calls from everybody I knew, and I remember being unsure if it was OK to get in touch with the guy I was sleeping with, or whether that wasn’t too forward. As in, maybe, if I wasn’t casual enough, he’d make me wait for him two blocks away next time….

This is the compromise I made about contacting Rob during what I decided, because I am Einstein, was an unusual circumstance. I sent him an email message with the subject header “ARE YOU OKAY?!?!?!?!”

There was nothing in the body of the text. That kept me mysterious. I sent that message off to Rob and patted myself on the back. I thought my email was a great balance between concern about whether my friend with benefits was all right after a terrorist attack, and nonchalance, which I figured would, one day, make him treat me better. Among the unfathomable multitude of things I did not know at the time is that a “friend with benefits” is like a unicorn that shits cupcakes-fun to imagine, but not actually real.

Julie Klausner is not going to tell you right now that things with Rob don’t actually, in the end, work out very well. No, not at all! I know, right? That’s the sneaky way we have here at The Awl try to get you to buy her book.

“U.S. President Barack Obama still plans to meet the Dalai Lama, the White House said on Tuesday, despite China warning that such a meeting would hurt ties between the world’s biggest and third-biggest economies.” Good for the president. It takes a lot of balls to give the middle finger to someone who basically owns all your debt. If he really wants to piss them off, he should totally bow.

by Ana Marie Cox

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel allegedly referred to liberals as “fucking retarded.” This caused great anguish to Sarah Palin, who noted that, “Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the ‘N-word’ or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities — and the people who love them — is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.” (Palin herself has allegedly used “the R-word,” although she has denied it.) A chastened Emmanuel apologized to any R-words he may have offended for his unflattering comparison to liberals. And now everything’s okay again in America.

Today’s A1 New York Times story about church fighting? It was written by Ross Schneiderman, a Times web producer who lost his job in the buyout/layoffs just back in December.